A Conversation with
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
About his groundbreaking work, A Code of Jewish Ethics
A Code of Jewish Ethics is the first of a three volume series.

What inspired you to begin this tremendous project?
Have you had a strong sense of justice ever since you can remember or did this grow over the years? I have long been distressed that the word religious is associated in people’s minds exclusively with ritual observance or issues of faith. Thus, if two people are speaking about a third and the question is raised, “Is so-and-so religious?” the answer will be based only on matters of ritual and faith (“He keeps the Sabbath, he is religious,” or “ He doesn’t keep the Sabbath, he is not religious”), and one could easily form the impression that ethics are, in God’s and religion’s eyes, an extracurricular activity, something that is nice, but not all that important. So I wanted to write a book that would bring together in one place 3000 years of Jewish teachings on being a decent and just person.

What effect do you think your book will have on Judaism as it is practiced today?
I hope it will refocus attention on issues such as fair speech (expressing anger fairly, speaking about others in a just manner), good manners and civility, gratitude, judging other people fairly, the paramount significance of the ethical within Judaism, and the relationship between God and ethics.

Can you define the relationship between religion and ethics?
Judaism has long taught that ethical behavior is God’s foremost and central demand of human beings. Thus, 2,000 years ago, when a non-Jew asked Hillel, one of the greatest rabbinic figures in all of Jewish history, to define the essence of Judaism while standing on one foot, he answered, “What is hateful unto you, don’t do unto your neighbor. The rest is commentary. Now go and study.” Ethics are central. But we have to spend our lives in study, because it is not always clear what is the ethical thing to do.

One of the aims of your book is to help each reader to become a “good” person.
How would you describe this path in a nutshell?
To develop one’s moral imagination. Technology, science and medicine made tremendous advances in the twentieth century because an individual or a group of people used the full resources of their intellectual imagination to find solutions to problems that had previously been thought to be insoluble. But if we did not make as much progress in the twentieth century in the ethical sphere it is, in part, because people rarely use the full resources of their moral imagination, and rarely apply their full intellectual efforts to ferreting out the right way to act. So if we use our moral imagination, and keep in mind Hillel’s nut shell definition, “What is hateful unto you, don’t do unto your neighbor,” we will almost always find that we have done the right thing. A Conversation with Rabbi Joseph Telushkin.